100 Notable Books of 2010

AMERICAN SUBVERSIVE.By David Goodwillie. (Scribner, $25.) A bombing unites a blogger and a beautiful eco-terrorist in this literary thriller, an exploration of what motivates radicalism in an age of disillusion.

ANGELOLOGY.By Danielle Trussoni. (Viking, $27.95.) With a smitten art historian at her side, the young nun at the center of this rousing first novel is drawn into an ancient struggle against the Nephilim, hybrid offspring of humans and heavenly beings.

THE ASK.By Sam Lipsyte. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) A deeply cynical academic fund-raiser fighting for his job is the protagonist of this darkly humorous satire, a witty paean to white-collar loserdom.

BOUND.By Antonya Nelson. (Bloomsbury, $25.) For Nelson’s complacent heroine, the death of an estranged friend elicits memories of their reckless youth.

COMEDY IN A MINOR KEY.By Hans Keilson. Translated by Damion Searls. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.) Set in Nazi-occupied Europe, this novel, appearing only now in English, is a mid-century masterpiece by the centenarian Keilson, who served in the Dutch resistance.

FOREIGN BODIES.By Cynthia Ozick. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26.) This nimble, entertaining homage to Henry James’s late work “The Ambassadors,” in which an American heads to Paris to retrieve a wayward son, brilliantly upends the theme, meaning and stylistic manner of its revered precursor.

FREEDOM.By Jonathan Franzen. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) Like Franzen’s previous novel, “The Corrections,” this is a masterly portrait of a nuclear family in turmoil, with an intricately ordered narrative and a majestic sweep that seems to gather up every fresh datum of our shared millennial life.

FUN WITH PROBLEMS: Stories.By Robert Stone. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24.) Our enduring central struggle — the battle between the head and the heart — is enacted again and again in Stone’s collection.

THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST.By Stieg Larsson. (Knopf, $27.95.) In the third installment of the pulse-racing trilogy featuring Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, the pair are threatened by an adversary from deep within the very government that should be protecting them.

GREAT HOUSE.By Nicole Krauss. (Norton, $24.95.) In this tragic vision of a novel, Nadia, a writer in New York, faces a wrenching parting when a girl shows up to claim an enormous desk that has been in her safekeeping for decades.

HOW TO READ THE AIR.By Dinaw Mengestu. (Riverhead, $25.95.) Mengestu’s own origins inform this tale of an Ethiopian-American tracing the uncertain road once taken by his parents.

I CURSE THE RIVER OF TIME.By Per Petterson. Translated by Charlotte Barslund with Per Petterson. (Graywolf, $23.) This novel’s lonely Scandinavian protagonist grapples with divorce, death and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

THE IMPERFECTIONISTS.By Tom Rachman. (Dial, $25.) This intricate novel is built around the personal stories of staff members at an improbable English-language newspaper in Rome, and of the family who founded it in the 1950s.

THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE.By Julie Orringer. (Knopf, $26.95.) Orringer’s protagonist is a Jewish architecture student in late-1930s Paris forced to return home to Hungary ahead of the Nazi invasion there.

THE LONG SONG.By Andrea Levy. (Frances Coady/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Levy’s high-spirited, ambitious heroine works on a plantation in the final days of slavery in Jamaica.

THE LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY.By Zachary Mason. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) The conceit behind the multiple Odysseuses here (comic, dead, doubled, amnesiac) is that this is a translation of an ancient papyrus, a collection of variations on the myth.

THE LOTUS EATERS.By Tatjana Soli. (St. Martin’s, $24.99.) The photojournalist heroine of Soli’s Vietnam War novel ponders whether those who represent war merely replicate its violence.

MATTERHORN: A Novel of the Vietnam War.By Karl Marlantes. (El León Literary Arts/Atlantic Monthly, $24.95.) In this tale, 30 years in the creation, bloody folly envelops a Marine company’s construction, abandonment and retaking of a remote hilltop outpost.

MR. PEANUT.By Adam Ross. (Knopf, $25.95.) In this daring first novel, a computer game designer suspected of murdering his obese wife is investigated by two marriage-savvy detectives, one of whom is Dr. Sam Sheppard.

THE NEAREST EXIT.By Olen Steinhauer. (Minotaur, $25.99.) The C.I.A. spy in this thriller is sick of his trade’s duplicity, amorality and rootlessness.

THE NEW YORKER STORIES.By Ann Beattie. (Scribner, $30.) This collection of tales dating back to 1974 lets readers imagine their way into a New Yorker fiction editor’s moment of discovery.

ONE DAY.By David Nicholls. (Vintage, paper, $14.95.) Nicholls’s nostalgic novel checks in year by year on the halting romance of two children of the ’80s, she an outspoken lefty, he an apolitical toff.

THE PRIVILEGES.By Jonathan Dee. (Random House, $25.) In this contemporary morality tale, a family stumbles along, rich and dysfunctional, without ethical or moral responsibility.

ROOM.By Emma Donoghue. (Little, Brown, $24.99.) Donoghue’s remarkable novel is narrated by a 5-year-old boy, whose entire world is the 11-by-11-foot room in which his mother is being held against her will.

THE SAME RIVER TWICE.By Ted Mooney. (Knopf, $26.95.) In this nuanced literary thriller, a deal to acquire Soviet-era cultural artifacts puts a Parisian clothing designer and her filmmaker husband in peril.

SELECTED STORIES.By William Trevor. (Viking, $35.) These stories, gathered from Trevor’s last four collections, are frequently melancholy, concerned with loss and disappointment, but warmed with radiant moments of grace or acceptance.

SHADOW TAG.By Louise Erdrich. (Harper/HarperCollins, $25.99.) Erdrich’s portrait of a marriage on its way to dissolution appears to be seeded with deliberate allusions to her own relationship with the writer Michael Dorris.

SOLAR.By Ian McEwan. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $26.95.) In McEwan’s funniest novel yet, a self-deluding physicist cheats on his wives, sends an innocent man to jail and tries to cash in on another scientist’s plans against global warming.

SOMETHING RED.By Jennifer Gilmore. (Scribner, $25.) Gilmore’s contemplative second novel explores the lost ideals and lingering illusions of a family once politically committed to bettering the world.

SOURLAND: Stories.By Joyce Carol Oates. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $25.99.) Oates explores the idea that the bereaved wife is a kind of guilty party who deserves everything — most of it violent — that comes her way.

THE SPOT: Stories.By David Means. (Faber & Faber, $23.) Like Beckett, Means reveals a God-like inclination to see his characters as forsaken case studies.

THE SURRENDERED.By Chang-rae Lee. (Riverhead, $26.95.) As death draws near, Lee’s heroine, a Korean War orphan now living in New York, sets off for Europe to look for her estranged son.

THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET.By David Mitchell. (Random House, $26.) Mitchell’s historical novel about a young Dutchman in Edo-era Japan is an achingly romantic story of forbidden love and something of an adventurous rescue tale.

THE THREE WEISSMANNS OF WESTPORT.By Cathleen Schine. (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Two Manhattan sisters, one wildly emotional, one smartly sensible, come to the aid of their beloved aging mother.

TO THE END OF THE LAND.By David Grossman. Translated by Jessica Cohen. (Knopf, $26.95.) Two friends are deeply involved with the same woman in this somber, haunting novel of love and loyalty in time of conflict, set in Israel between 1967 and 2000.

A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD.By Jennifer Egan. (Knopf, $25.95.) In her centrifugal, unclassifiably elaborate narrative, Egan creates a set of characters with assorted links to the music business and lets time have its way with them.

WHAT BECOMES: Stories.By A. L. Kennedy. (Knopf, $24.95.) Though the characters in her harrowing fourth collection buckle under the weight of misfortune, Kennedy can go from darkness to humor in a heartbeat.

APOLLO’S ANGELS: A History of Ballet.By Jennifer Homans. (Random House, $35.) The question of classical ballet’s very survival lies at the heart of this eloquent, truly definitive history, which traces dance across four centuries of wars and revolutions, both artistic and political.

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THE BRIDGE: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama.By David Remnick. (Knopf, $29.95.) This study of Obama before he became president, by the editor of The New Yorker, has many important additions and corrections to make to our reading of “Dreams From My Father.”

CLEOPATRA: A Life.By Stacy Schiff. (Little, Brown, $29.99.) It’s dizzying to contemplate the ancient thicket of personalities and propaganda Schiff penetrates to show the Macedonian-Egyptian queen in all her ambition, audacity and formidable intelligence.

COLONEL ROOSEVELT.By Edmund Morris. (Random House, $35.) The final volume of Morris’s monumental life of Theodore Roosevelt vividly covers the eventful nine years after he left office.

THE EMPEROR OF ALL MALADIES: A Biography of Cancer.By Siddhartha Mukherjee. (Scribner, $30.) Mukherjee’s powerful and ambitious history of cancer and its treatment is an epic story he seems compelled to tell, like a young priest writing a biography of Satan.

FOUR FISH: The Future of the Last Wild Food.By Paul Greenberg. (Penguin Press, $25.95.) Even as Greenberg lays out the grim and complicated facts about the ravaging of our seas, he manages to sound some hopeful notes about the ultimate fate of fish.

HITCH-22: A Memoir.By Christopher Hitchens. (Twelve, $26.99.) When the colorful, prolific journalist shares a tender memory, he quickly converts it into a larger observation about politics, always for him the most crucial sphere of moral and intellectual life.

THE HONOR CODE: How Moral Revolutions Happen.By Kwame Anthony Appiah. (Norton, $25.95.) A philosopher traces the demise of dueling and slavery among the British and of foot-binding in China, and suggests how a fourth horrific practice — honor killings in today’s Pakistan — might someday meet its end.

THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS.By Rebecca Skloot. (Crown, $26.) Skloot untangles the ethical issues in the case of a woman who unknowingly donated cancer cells that have been the basis for a vast amount of research.

INSECTOPEDIA.By Hugh Raffles. (Pantheon, $29.95.) In this beautifully written, slyly humorous encyclopedia, Raffles seeks to redress the speciesism that has cast insects as creatures to be regarded with distrust and disgust.

LIFE.By Keith Richards with James Fox. (Little, Brown, $29.99.) Reading Richards’s autobiography is like getting to corner him in a room to ask everything you always wanted to know about the Rolling Stones.

PARISIANS: An Adventure History of Paris.By Graham Robb. (Norton, $28.95.) This series of character studies — some of familiar figures, some not — is arranged to give meaning to a volatile, complicated city.

POPS: A Life of Louis Armstrong.By Terry Teachout. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30.) This biography maintains that discomfort with Armstrong’s public persona has led detractors to minimize his enormous contributions to music and to civilization.

THE PROMISE: President Obama, Year One.By Jonathan Alter. (Simon & Schuster, $28.) This appraisal by a Newsweek columnist is mercifully free of the sensationalistic tone of other recent campaign books.

THE PUBLISHER: Henry Luce and His American Century.By Alan Brinkley. (Knopf, $35.) The creator of Time and Life used his magazines to advance political favorites, paint an uplifting portrait of the middle class and promote American intervention in the world.

WASHINGTON: A Life. By Ron Chernow. (Penguin Press, $40.) Chernow brings his considerable literary talent to bear on the continued hunger of many Americans for more tales of the first president’s exploits.

WILLIE MAYS: The Life, the Legend.By James S. Hirsch. (Scribner, $30.) In his long, fascinating account, Hirsch concentrates mostly on the baseball brilliance, reminding us of a time when the only performance-enhancing drug was joy.